Time, Remixed

On a recent Wednesday night, the artist Richard McGuire discussed his new book, “Here,” with Bill Kartalopoulos, the editor of the Best American Comics series, at 192 Books, on Tenth Avenue. “Here” is an intimate view of a fixed space over time—a corner of a living room, or the space in the world it occupies—spanning millions of years, in styles ranging from comic art to illustration to watercolor. Scenes often show multiple time periods simultaneously, through the use of frames, and cultural echoes appear in close proximity: a boy near a couch, in 1950, wearing a feather headdress and standing next to a small teepee; Lenape Indians joking and flirting in the woods in 1609. The deep past (fires, swamps) and the far-out future (catastrophic sea levels, holograms) have gently rendered notes of the Biblical and the apocalyptic. The inclusiveness of McGuire’s approach, and his careful observational humor, feels affectionate and empathetic.

“Here” itself is something that McGuire has been exploring over time. The book’s precursor, the groundbreaking six-page comic “Here,” was published in RAW, in 1989, and he developed the book for fifteen years, beginning in 1999. (McGuire, a New Yorker cover artist and spot illustrator, also applied the idea to a Manhattan street on a November cover, “Time Warp.”) He worked on the book intermittently, in rotation with other projects, and during that time his parents and older sister died. With these losses, his relationship to his childhood house shifted. His memories of it, images of his family, imaginings about who had lived there before, and historical study and invention appear throughout.

McGuire, who is fifty-six, has a kind face, a bald head, and the manner of a thoughtful observer. Kartalopoulos said, “I’m delighted by the book ‘Here,’ and I’m delighted by the attention to Richard that the book has occasioned. For a long time, he has had many different audiences who may not always have been aware of each other.” McGuire is also a musician, a visual artist, a children’s-book author, and an animator. All of his work, Kartalopoulos said, has a “real mark of perfection” and “intelligent humanity.” The fields McGuire works in suggest an interconnectedness similar to “Here” ’s. He studied visual art at Rutgers in the late seventies, which, he said, led to his playing music. He co-founded his band, Liquid Liquid, in 1980, and also did graphic design for it.

“We’re mostly known for samples,” McGuire said. “We had kind of a cult following among d.j.s.” He didn’t elaborate. But the most famous of these is McGuire’s unmistakable and thrilling bass line from Liquid Liquid’s “Cavern,” from 1983, re-created in “White Lines (Don’t Do It),” by Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel, from the same year. (Listen to “Cavern” and you will notice similarities—vocals, transitions, beat—beyond the bass line; it’s like a bowl that “White Lines” was poured into.)

In his early years in New York, McGuire said, “everyone I knew was in a band, or a filmmaker or an artist. When I moved here, one of the first things I did was do drawings around town—my response to graffiti. Through that I met a lot of people. I became friends with Keith Haring, Basquiat, doing my street stuff with them before they were names.” McGuire’s street art had some parallels with cartoons—they were “just single images with some text on them, around the edge, and there was a central character”—but he didn’t consider himself a cartoonist.

The concept of “Here,” the comic strip, arose from several influences. One was an idea that Art Spiegelman, the co-editor of RAW with Françoise Mouly, described during a lecture McGuire attended: that “comic strips are essentially diagrams.” Second, McGuire had just moved into a new apartment and was thinking about the people who had lived there before him. “I chose a corner of a room because I was originally going to do a story where it divided down the center, and one half of the room was going forward in time and the other was going backward in time,” he said. Third—the “eureka moment,” he said—came when a friend showed him a computer with some new software he’d never seen before: Microsoft Windows. He said, “When I saw these multiple windows, I thought, With multiple windows you can have different times in the same space!” Another influence was “the photographs that my mom used to take in one location, every year, at Christmastime,” of the kids as they grew up, changing over time. (Versions of these appear in the book.)

When he sent “Here” to Spiegelman, at RAW, he was surprised when, “boom,” he got in right away. The comic was quickly and strongly influential, to Chris Ware and other artists. Years later, McGuire signed a contract to expand “Here” into a book, but he soon got sidetracked by other projects. “If it had come out in 1999, it would have been a totally different book, because I didn’t have the life experience,” McGuire said. The loss of his relatives, and the house, “really did affect the mood of the book,” he said. Almost all that he took from the house was family photographs. A fellowship at the Cullman Center, at the New York Public Library, allowed him to do research that helped him to complete the book. Formal ideas did, too.

Kartalopoulos said, “I admired the original comics quite a bit. It was hard to imagine what a book would be like. The master stroke was the conceit you ultimately arrived at, wherein the gutter of the book is the corner of the room. It gives it almost a forced perspective, a three-dimensional quality.”

“I built a little version of the room out of foam core,” McGuire said. “And when I physically made the corner, or just folded a piece of paper or something in my studio, I was like, Oh! Yeah! Do it like this!” The book is mesmerizing in a different way from its pen-and-ink source: because it feels three-dimensional while you’re reading it, the book almost becomes your home. It’s soothing and full-color, with soft hues and a visual style somewhere between a picture book and a graphic novel. (Some of the colors evoke those in faded photographs.) The time-portal boxes, or windows, feel like framed pictures hung on a wall, fitting harmoniously into the backdrop. From page to page, the décor changes: Victorian wallpaper, potted palms; mid-century-modern furniture, flat-screen TV. The humans visiting from the past or future, like orderly ghosts, are framed elegantly, with squared edges.

McGuire said that he loves that the book makes you feel like you’re physically inside the room. “But there are advantages to the early version, too,” he said. “When you have multiple panels on the same page, your eye can dance around that much quicker. It makes connections. I really feel like each medium has its strengths.” The book isn’t a single medium, either. “When I signed the contract, there was no such thing as an iPad,” he said. But now there is, and it gave him another opportunity for reinvention. You can read it normally—or not. “If you click on the panels and the dates, it starts to explode them,” he said. “If you click on the upper corner, it makes new combinations that don’t exist inside the printed book. It reinvents it, even for me—combinations I never would have imagined. But there are story threads. So if there’s something you want to follow, you can touch that panel and continue reading that little story.” He said it was “kind of like having a remix version of the book.”

Kartalopoulos said that the print book, too, “has a musical structure to it.”

“It’s definitely composed,” McGuire said. "It had to have a beginning and an end. I had the entire thing up on the wall in my studio, and I had to find the kind of flow of it." At first, he thought that expanding a six-page story to three hundred pages would require writing long story threads. "Then I realized that there had to be a balance, and it had to just be free enough to flow. And in that way it’s very musical, for sure. It had these breaths, and then more chaotic moments. And I would constantly shuffle stuff around." There were many elements to shuffle: history, characters, environments. He wanted the location to be an everyplace, but he realized that in order to go deeper it had to become more specific. So he incorporated real-life details. “There’s a moment in the book where these archeologists come to the house, and they’re talking about digging up the back yard. That really happened,” he said. His mother loved history, and would take him, as a kid, to see Washington’s headquarters, where he’d look at a velvet rope blocking off a historic room and imagine who had been there. “But she drew the line at the idea of digging up her garden. When they left, she told me that they said there were Indian bones in the back yard. I never looked at my back yard the same way.”

The house across the street from the McGuires’ house, in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, “was once the governor’s home, and the governor was William Franklin, who was the bastard child of Benjamin Franklin,” he said. “They were really tight. As he got older, they went their separate ways politically, and there was a moment where Ben came to him and was like, ‘You’re on the wrong side of history!’ ” He put that in, too. But he had to keep such finds in perspective. “It’s not about that; it’s a bigger picture. There’s an argument happening across the street by a father and son, and it just happens to be a little microcosm of the country.” Details about family life are often universal, he said. “I had this motto that I was going to make the big things small and the small things big. A moment that you wouldn’t normally document—that’s what I was going for.”

Kartalopoulos pointed out some of the book’s other big things: climate change, rising sea levels. “The book covers a massive chronological period,” he said.

McGuire said yes, he’d included the end of the world—the sun runs out of energy, starts to swell, and sucks in all the planets—but putting it in the main action seemed too dramatic, so he put it on the TV. “And somebody’s watching it, going, ‘Glad I’m not going to be around for that.’ ”

McGuire said that he feels that, with this project, and in his life, things happen in cycles: the idea for “Here” came in part from Windows; now we have an iPad version. Kartalopoulos said, “It makes me think of Marshall McLuhan. In the sixties, he talked about how new video technology was taking humanity away from the very linear regime of the nineteenth century, based on linear type and the steam engine, and going back to a kind of pre-industrial acoustic space based on simultaneity and three-hundred-and-sixty-degree perception. I feel like he is a thousand times more right now that we have the Internet.” He said that McGuire’s project “crystallized that in a way that hasn’t been quite crystallized before.”

McGuire, looking quietly excited and thinking about the future of “Here,” said that he was hoping to have lunch with a friend who was working with virtual-reality technology.

“It almost seems like you are not leaving that room,” Kartalopoulos said.

“No, everything circles back,” McGuire said. “My whole life has been a series of circles. Like I leave the band, and then reissues come out, and then I’m playing with the band again. And then I’m doing this project again.” He continues to rotate along: in a show at MOMA, “Making Music Modern,” in a gallery show in Paris, and with film and book projects. “I like mixing it up,” he said. “I love the idea of just making things.” After answering questions and signing books—and stamping them with custom-made rubber “Here” stamps of a cat and a fireplace—he headed to dinner downtown, with a big group of friends: filmmakers, editors, writers, and artists, a remix of his crowd from 1980.

Sarah Larson is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her column, Podcast Dept., appears on newyor­ker.com.